A Personal Post

I was telling one of the two people that know me/read this journal that the other day I received yet another e-mail from an antique online personals ad (hadn't placed an ad in about a year) and briefly considered meeting someone. Why? To have more stories for this LJ. These are the lengths I was pondering going to until I realized that Iwanted to keep all of my horrible sex stories in the past.

Then I got another e-mail. I didn't reply to it. Instead I decided to update my profile on the dating site, and see if I got any replies.

This is how it reads:

Someone recently made a degrading remark about a gay mutual friend, and implied that the annoying fantasy world he lived in was because he was gay. When I replied that I'd rather not be lumped into a category with the lunatic simply because we both liked cock and ass, my friend said "Wait, you swing that way too?" "Yes," I said, "but whereas many of our gay friends prefer to swing for the fences, I prefer to bunt."

This pretty much sums up my sexuality.

Odds are, if you see me in a gym, I'm asking for directions. By the same token, if you see me up at the buffet with a heaping plate of food, I'm filling my plate for someone confined to a wheelchair or a pantsuit.


Ideal Person: So far my experience with men has been, at best, unbalanced. I've had some mundane relationships with people who I really cared about, and I've had some amazing sex with people I wouldn't mind seeing strapped to an anchor and dropped off in the deep side of the continental shelf.

I'm tempted to write that I'm looking for someone interested in more than just sex, but I should point out that "more than just sex" implies that they're interested in sex. I already have friends who don't put out.

I don't really go to clubs, but that's mainly because I work nights, not because I think I'm too good for them.

I'm not interested in married guys or people into in-depth role playing. I have a father, thank you, and there is a reason I don't have kids. That said, I'm pretty open minded in the bedroom (and the kitchen, and the bathroom at City Hall, and the sidewalk in front of my Republican neighbor's house...) but there's only one bodily fluid I'm interested in exchanging, and it doesn't usually involve toilets.

Basically, I'm looking for someone for a LTR, but realize I'll probably have to go through a few one-night-stands/STRs to get there. As long as there are no STDs I'll be a happy man.

I wonder if I'll get any interesting replies.

original post: http://insafemode.livejournal.com/8439.html?view=2873079#t2873079

Why I Almost Just Hurled

After a long day of work, I came home to write some e-mails and get to bed. After typing up a few LJ comments, I went to rap my fingers against the desk and got three fingertips coated in my (I assume) roommate's semen. Where is my Lava soap?

Uck. It's not like there isn't a box of Kleenex right next to the desk.

At least I didn't bang my head against it.

original post: http://community.livejournal.com/2_much_sex_info/41207.html

Sexual Harassment Theatre

As a general rule, I don't mess around with people I work with. Sometimes I break that rule, but it comforts me to know the rule is there to fall back on.

I recently discovered that several people I've known and worked with for the last two and a half years don't even know I'm gay. I mean the gay people I work with don't know I'm gay. The dreaded curse of the SSGG (Straight-seeming gay guy). I don't hide my sexuality. In fact, they should make videos of the way I behave at work and show it to potential employees just to warn them away. I'm like a roving Scared-Not-Straight Campaign.

I'll be posting a bunch of stories involving myself, Jeremy The King Of Bisexual Harassment and Equality, and John The Weirdest Perv I Know Outside of My Friends List.

Here's tonight's story:

I was training a new kid. Let's call him...Jason because that's his name. Normally when I'm training I tend to be more matter-of-fact than normal, but this was the kid's fourth night. If he didn't get it by now, he was gonna be busing tables instead of waiting on them.

I thought I had been fairly low-key the past few shifts, not being the perverted ass that I can be. I was wrong. I know this because after my sincere conversation about what I expected him to do, and what I felt we should work on, I asked "Is there anything you think you need my help with?" To which he replies: "If I need anything from you, I'll scrape it off my zipper."

¿¿¿What???

I'm fairly sure he got the line mixed up, but I can guess the intention behind it, so I preceded to make the rest of his night Sexual Harassment Hell. I sicced Big Rich on him.

Big Rich is far gayer than even Big Gay Tom. Big Rich is a fiftyish year old man about 6'2", at least 300 pounds. He kisses the tops of guy's heads for no discernable reason, likes to pinch people, and seems to have a fetish for youngish looking asian and/or jock boys. Who doesn't?

Anyhow, I have Rich invading his space all night. After about a half an hour, Jason playfully slaps my ass while I'm carrying a tray of food. Oh, it's on now, motherfucker.

I start carrying a big wooden breadboard with me. I "accidentally" slap his ass with it while he's taking an order from a table. He retaliates with a bread board while I'm up at the bar. As he reaches into the bread oven I wind up and CRACK!!!

I (A)break the breadboard on his ass, which causes (B)his upper body to spasm upwards, pressing his (C)arm against the top of the bread oven (D) which is very hot causing him to (E)curse so loud you can probably hear him outside in the restaurant's parking lot, which causes (F)another server to drop a plate, and eventually the whole kitchen is involved in a very Rube Goldbergesque scenario.

His arm is not actually burnt, making me feel a little better. He whimpers out "I think my ass is bleeding." and then proceeds to go check. Of course it's not. Bruised perhaps, but it's not like I poked him with a skewer.

That ended our breadboard warfare. While I don't know if I ended up winning for the night, I know he ended up losing, as another server for reasons that had nothing to do with me took his cell phone camera thingy into the bathroom and left him all sorts of blurry dirty pictures.

Sometimes I love my job.

original post: http://insafemode.livejournal.com/4289.html

All Moby, No Dick

There was a reason Justin never sent me a pic. I'm not choosy, but he wasn't my type. Not unattractive, but too fat to comfortably fuck. A friend once told me that he hated having sex with other fat people because it was tough to stay penetrated. I'd never experienced that before tonight.

We were off to a bad start when we realized that neither of us had done any online dating since the nineties. We were obviously uncomfortable around each other & had little chemistry apart from both liking the same TV shows.

Drank a beer to get prepared. I hate beer.

Started out in the shower. He was bigger without his clothes. Smooth but awkward. I knew I should have gone home. He was too big to shower with, so we headed to the bedroom.

The bedroom had a couple of dildos out and some lube. I had brought the condoms.

He likes to give head with the latex on. Had I known I would have bought flavored condoms.

Despite not being attracted to him in any way, I managed to get aroused. He gave decent head.

After a few minutes he was ready to get fucked. This is when I realized that I am an emotionless robot. If I'm not attracted to someone I have the most mechanical sex imagineable.

It was tough to find a position to get comfortable in. He was clearly too big to be comfortably on top of me. It would be like being pinned by The Canadian Earthquake. His bed wasn't high enough for him to be laid out on his back, so we ended up doggy-style.

Usually I'm all about long tantric sex, but I just wanted this to be overwith, so I ended up coming in about eight minutes. Yes, I looked at the clock. That's how bad it was.

The hard part would be getting him off. I'm not a fan of licking latex, and haven't bottomed for anybody in about six years, though I don't dislike it. I decided I'd rather get fucked for a while than lick latex.

He lubed up a condom, and put it over a butt plug which he then sat on. I laid on my stomach, forgetting that the bed was too low for this to be a comfortable option. Doggystyle again. It didn't work too well, though, as his stomach kept getting in the way. Also he was much more of a bottom than a top, so he was having trouble staying hard.

After about two minutes the condom fell off, and that was all she wrote. I wasn't into it enough to kiss or give proper attention to keeping him aroused. My passionless jerking of his cock did nothing for either of us.

He was clearly embarrassed. He offered to pay for a cab ride home, claiming it was too cold for me to walk to the subway. It wasn't that cold. Neither of us broached the subject of his not getting off, but he was clearly disappointed. So was I.

At least I don't have to wash santorum out of my boxers.

original posts: http://insafemode.livejournal.com/458.html, http://community.livejournal.com/bad_sex/379486.html

Who Let The Penguins Out?

I have decided to move again. I can't take the cold so I'm going to move to a warmer clime like Siberia, Moscow, of the North fricken Pole. It was twenty degrees warmer today in Moscow than it was in Boston. When I went to open my front door today, my hand broke off on the knob. You read that right. I am now typing one handed, and not because LJ entries turn me on.

I went to the aquarium today and asked one of the workers if he would consider letting the penguins out to play. I think he thought he was coming on to him, though I'm not sure what "letting the penguins out" means in perv. The sea lion I could see, but penguins?

When I'm a millionaire I'm going to buy me some Emperor Penguins and let them loose on the streets of Boston. Sure, they look cute on TV, but imagine walking down the street on your way to the grocery store and seeing a flock of pissed off four foot tall penguins waddling towards you. Everyone assumes penguins just eat fish, but there's not a lot of human flesh around in the Emperor Penguins natural habitat. In fact, it gets so cold in Antarctica that every type of bird migrates except for the Emperors. They're some hardcore fucken penguins. I bet if I start feeding them human flesh, they'd develop a taste for it and start running amok in a way that even Alfred Hitchcock couldn't imagine.



The new Opus strip wouldn't be very popular then, would it?

Christmas In A Piece Of Shit Desert Town

If I could have been someone, anyone, else for Christmas last year, I would have. Since I had no ID, I technically could have been someone else. It was the not having the ID that was the problem. Somewhere during my three day trek from Boston to Arizona, I lost my driver's license. Again. I had managed to survive five months without the documentation, procuring two jobs, and even being served liquor by some very accommodating Mormons. Unfortunately, the people at Delta airlines were determined to make my life difficult.

All I wanted to do was go home. Not just for Christmas, but forever. I'd had it with Martyr Complexed "friends", cracked out Goth losers with too much ecstasy and not enough brain cells, and I'd really had it with being broke. Every paycheck I earned went to a roommate that I only actually lived with for two months, though I paid rent for three. She was a much better roommate than say...Melissa Plummer, but she certainly didn't make my Favorite Roommate of All Time list. Then, again, I'm sure I didn't make her list either. It was a bad fall. I wanted out of Arizona. I couldn't think of one thing about this state that I was going to miss.

Add to this the fact that one of my uncles, and my Grandfather were both on the other side of the country, getting ready to distribute their wills, and I was very anxious to get home:

***Author's note: Time jump. It is now no longer 2004, but December 2003. It was a short time jump, more of a time hop, really, but I thought I'd let you know.***

Synopsis of the week so far. Call airline to let them know I have no ID. Am advised to kill myself, there is no way on plane. Call VT DMV to find out how to get new ID. Am advised to call AZ DMV. Call AZ DMV. Am advised to get lost. I consider going Greyhound. Get good info from Steggy. Get an e-mail from a police officer/poet/friend informing me I need only file a report with the PD, and they'll give me paperwork to get on my flight (which is now the third scheduled flight on the third different airline).

I call the PD, fill out an incident/lost ID report. Am advised to call VT DMV, that they will fax a copy of my ID to me. Call VT DMV. Am advised that it is against federal law to fax me any ID info. This makes me comfortable security wise, decidedly cross on getting-homewise. They suggest I call the AZ DMV, that they can help me. Call AZ DMV. They are completely useless and can do nothing. They are the only people I called that are both useless AND rude. I call the airlines and update them on my situation: no ID, no ID related paperwork, one copy of my incident report. Am advised that I will probably be able to get a boarding pass, but that the gvt. security has the right not to let me on the plane without ID. I call the gvt. agency (Flight Security or something). Am informed by a very nice lady that apart from checking my bags, I should have no problem with the gvt. security, but that the airline will probably not give me a boarding pass. Call airline again. Update them on the gvt. security issue. Am advised that it's not up to them or the gvt. agency, but Phoenix Skyway. Call Phoenix Skyway. Am advised that it's not up to them, but really the airline.

The terrorists have already won. I just want to get the fuck home.

ATA airlines to the rescue. I don't know what ATA stands for, but they promise to give me a boarding pass, and let me deal with security. I damn near crawled through the phone and gave the lady on the other end cunnilingus. You have no idea how much I have to love a person to offer that.

My flight leaves on the 26th. Tomorrow. A day too late to spend Christmas with my family, but at least it gets me out of this fucken town. To celebrate, I threw on my bathing suit and went out to do water angels in the pool. Soon enough I'll be able to do snow angels. For now, this is comforting.

Several...ok, two...very kind people have offered to include me in their Christmas plans. Bob the Amazing has done enough for me. He got me a job, he tried his best to keep me from killing certain people who could have used a good dying, he even had me over for Thanksgiving for an amazing meal with his family. Chris the World's Cutest Straight Boy invited me as well. But, like Bob, he's done so much that I don't want to infringe on him anymore. He offered to get me out of my roommate's house long before I was unhappy there. He helped me move my stuff to his apartment, where I'm not paying rent, I even had to talk him down last week when my ex-roommate came buy to pick up the last check. I really thought he was going to rip the skin off her face and shove it down her sanctimonious throat.

Because I didn't want to alter their Christmas plans, I am on my own. I've got all the ingredients for Ground Nut Stew, a computer, a DVD of my favorite gay porn, and a two liter bottle of Cherry Coke. It's entirely possible that this Christmas will only Mostly Suck.

I toss the sauce I made for the stew last night in the microwave, put some rice on the stove, and turn on the TV. I don't want to risk being distracted by porn or The Internet while the food is cooking. The only things on TV are "The Married With Children Christmas" and "A Very Brady Christmas". I am officially in Hell. Although, "A Very Brady Christmas" isn't nearly as bad as I'd imagined. It's a reunion show. The kids are all grown up. Dad Brady is very obviously making eyes at Greg Brady. All in all it's---why is the fire alarm going off? FUCK!!!! THE RICE!!!!

I rush to the stove, pull off the pot. Curse myself for not thinking to use a towel. Put my now burned hand under some cold water. It doesn't look too bad. I grab a towel, pick up the pot and begin scraping the rice into the garbage disp---oh fuck. You don't put rice in the garbage disposal. I dig out as much as I can and then hit the switch. Grind grind grind grind grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgrgrgrgrgrgrgr

grgrrg sputter wheeze. Fuck.

I open all the doors and windows, and turn on all the fans, blowing the burned rice smell throughout Christopher's condo complex. Here's the smell of my holiday cheer Ari-fucken-zona! I then go to scrub the rice that burned into the bottom of the pan in the sink.

Joy of joys, my garbage disposal breaking is causing the sink to back up. How am I supposed to clean up this mess if I can't use the si...ahhh, I'll use the shower.

I don't think it's possible for anyone, even people who've known me for years, to imagine the look on my face when I realized the rice that was blocking the sink/garbage disposal in the kitchen, was now floating up into the bathtub. This was really Not Good. Christopher was Not Going to be Happy.

I cleaned up as best I could, popped the DVD in the computer, and prepared to pop myself.

Just as I was cruising down Ejaculation Alley, Christopher came home. I turned off the computer and zipped up. Most of the smoke had cleared, but he has Wolverine's sense of smell. "Burned rice?" he asked as soon as he walked in.

"Yeup."

"Hope you didn't try and get rid of it in the garbage disposal."

Velociraptor look.

"You did, didn't you? Fuck. I did it a couple of months ago. I had to call the condo people to fix it."

Man, my fuck up wasn't even original?

"I brought you some of the Girlie Beer that you left at The Kuk's house. If you put the red and green Skittlez in the Stoli Razz, it's almost like being festive."

Ok, maybe there was one thing I was going to miss.

original post: http://insafemode.livejournal.com/94370.html

Nerdy Punk Rock Animé Hair

Like I say at the beginning of all my support meetings, I am a nerd. I have a favorite comic artist and writer, and can give you in-depth reasons why I've chosen them. I write poetry. I perform said poetry in public. I've even done a couple of low-level national tours with other poets. I spent several years working at a renaissance faire. I liked it. I am a nerd.

I am also incredibly attracted to nerds. Sure the midwestern farm boy look is kind of hot. And who can resist a buff surfer boy. But give me mussy hair, glasses, and an IQ high enough to bake bread at, and I'm in love. And if they're multi-lingual...

Pardon me, I have to go change my pants.

Ahem, so...last year I was at a convention in Chicago. A friend of mine and I were staying at a hostel to cut down on the cost of the convention. It was the middle of August and the hostel had no air conditioning, and the free fans they supplied didn't work. We made plans to crash on the hotel room floors of other convention goers.

Why was I not whoring? Did I have a boyfriend? An STD? A sudden attack of morals? Hells, no. But in the five years I've been attending this convention I have never had the opportunity to stretch latex. Shit, I've never even been kissed by someone that I had a desire to be kissed by.

During the first day of the convention a good friend of mine reintroduced me to one of her gay friends. He was a hottie. Very punk nerd. Huge animé hair. I'd met him the year before and developed a mini-crush...until I caught him making out with my doppelganger (I have one...it's a story for another time). Note, I didn't stop crushing on him because he was making out with my doppelganger. The crush stopped when my doppelganger told me that Animé Hair was a terrible kisser.

At any rate, I spent some quality time hanging with Animé Hair and my friend (who might also have been referred to as Animé{e?} Hair), and decided he was a likable guy, but I refused to go all crush woozy. I was in fact chasing after a cute frustratingly straight attention whore who knew I had a crush on him (yet another story for another time).

At the end of the night, some friends and I ended up at the main hotel drinking and spitting words in the hotel room that contained, among other people, Animé Hair. As far as I could tell, no sparks were flying. Attention Whore left the room, to watch a couple of bisexual girls make out in one of the other rooms.

Over the course of the night, I had tried to get blitzed. Alas, I have a high tolerance for alcohol, and no love of beer, so getting blitzed can be expensive, even when the fairly unkind bud began being passed around the hotel room. Eventually, though, jet-lag, lack of sleep, alcohol, marijuana, and my interaction with Attention Whore made me dizzy. So when Animé Hair took my hostel room key and slid it into his pocket I was confused. Fairly soon after he took my key, his roommates decided that 4:28 in the morning was a good time to get some shut-eye, so I asked Animé Hair if he was coming to the hostel with me. He looked confused as I was and said sure.

We took an uneventful cab ride from hotel to hostel. We shot some shit and coy glances at each other. When we reached the hostel he said, "Well, I'd better get back to the hotel. I'll see you tomorrow."

"But" I stammered, as I fiddled with the door handle, "you have my room key."

"Huh?"

"My room key. You took my room key out of my hands back in your hotel room." I pulled the key out of his pocket. "See?"

"Oh. I'll come with you then." It made sense at the time. Really.

As I stepped from the cab I tripped a bit, and my canvas bag dropped to the pavement, spilling all my belongings. While I was collecting the books and papers, Animé Hair was snickering at me.

"What?"

"Progaine Shampoo?"

I turned crimson as my hair. "A pre-emptive strike against impending baldness."

He laughed some more. We went up to my room. I found out later that my roommate had crashed on Attention Whore's floor back at the hotel. We had the room to ourselves.

I'll spare you the coy boy flirtation ordeal and cut to the chase: he started talking about his boyfriend back home. Having previously learned my lesson regarding boys with boyfriends, I terminated flirtation. Or so I thought.

Animé Hair was spread out on my roommate's bed (which my roommate never got around to sleeping on). After every other sentence or so, he'd give me this incredibly flirtatious smirk. Finally, I could bear it no longer.

"If you've got a boyfriend, why do you keep looking at me like that?"

"Cause, hon, your dick is hanging out of your boxers."

Melissaphobia (Part 7: Inconclusion)

What Melissa didn't know was that I never had any intention of calling the police. I didn't have to.

When the college who cut me the check finally mailed me a copy of said check with my forged signature, I'd called a police officer friend of mine from Arizona. He'd advised me that the easiest way to ensure her suffering without having to get my own hands dirty, was to tell the bank that had cashed the check that the signature was forged. Then, the bank would reimburse the college, who would cut me a new check. Melissa would be at the bank's mercy, not mine.

But since she didn't know that (I hadn't called the bank yet), I figured I'd try to get a thousand dollars off her anyway because I was a poor bastard and she was a manipulative, lying bitch with a dog that had pissed all over my fucken clothes. I may have been a little bitter.

She didn't give me the thousand dollars. I never saw her again. Never had the satisfaction of knowing whether she was arrested or had huge penalties from the bank. I'm not even sure she got any financial comeuppance.

What I do know is that she got evicted. Whatever she did with the thousand dollars she essentially stole from me, she didn't use it to pay rent. Also, someone informed her landlord that she had been subleasing part of the apartment to me. She hadn't told him that. He was under the impression that only one person lived there, so he'd given her a great deal on rent. So during the year that I was there, I was paying 75% of the rent and had no idea. Since she was the one who was in contact with the landlord (I've been landlordphobic ever since I moved out of Hippieville), I just assumed we had been paying the same amount. One anonymous call to the landlord changed that.

I met the landlord one night while I was working at The Corporate Restaurant. He didn't know what happened to my bookshelf, my books, my comics, or my computer (and I didn't ask about the porn) but my bedframe and a few of my clothes had shown up in the basement, where (he informed me) all of my stuff had been stored while I was away. No wonder "the storage people" had easy access to the house, they lived in the basement.

I've only been back to the house once since the day Becca and I drove my stuff to storage. It's not too far from where I ended up moving to, but the house has some serious bad juju for me. Even though I know that Melissa hasn't lived there in about a year now, I always get really angry when I drive by, or when the subway passes within sight of it. I have the incredible urge to sneak into the driveway and let the air out of all her tires. But her tires aren't there.

If she didn't end up doing any jail time (and she probably didn't, I don't think she had any prior problems with the police or with banks), I'm imagining she moved back in with her parents. Why they should be punished for her crimes, I don't know. Then again, it was their terrible breeding and/or parenting techniques that contributed to the bipolar sociopath she became.

Blanket Statements

After a three month spoken word tour, I returned home to discover that my crazy ass bitch of a former roommate had changed the locks. For the next three weeks, I couch surfed between friends' houses.

Apart from the occasional shower session, I had been fairly non-masturbatory while I was on the road, and had greatly looked forward to crashing on my comfortable bed, and giving my hand the sort of attention it so desperately loves. So having to stay at friends' houses and sleep on their very public couches while they were at home, did not give me much opportunity for self-loving.

One set of friends, who we shall call Jerry and Lucy, gave me the key to their apartment for a few days. They planned on being home the entire time I was there, but just in case I went out to go grocery shopping, and came home after they'd left for work, they decided to play it safe.

The first four days I was there were so uneventful, I shouldn't have written this sentence. I took a break from staying with them to go visit some friends in a nearby town. I returned on a Wednesday night at around 1:30 in the morning. No one was home. Being lonely, and not very tired, I decided to throw in a movie. I saw the case for "Y Tu Mama Tambien", which several people had recommended to me, but which I hadn't yet come across. I popped it in, and was surprised to see naked hot guys pretty much immediately. Sure, they were having sex with naked hot chicks, and not each other, but it was still hot. As the movie progressed I became interested in it as something other than a cinematic experience. It was 2:30, the bars had been closed for over an hour, the people who lived in the house were not coming home.

Normally, when embarking on a ceiling semening session, I would prepare myself with Kleenex or some other form of cleaning material. But I hadn't really planned on seeing the session all the way through. But sure enough, just as I heard voices coming up the stairs to the apartment, the cork popped off the champagne bottle. I quickly pulled my boxers up, and threw a t-shirt on. The problem was, the blanket I was using was COVERED in cum. I folded the blanket in such a way that you couldn't see anything interesting, and sat up to watch the rest of the movie. Jerry, Lucy, and three of their friends stumbled drunkenly into the room.

"Hey, Safey. What's up?" Jerry asked, crashing down next to me on the couch.

"Nothing, just watching a movie."

We drunk talked for a few more minutes, and then he and Lucy went to their bedrooms, and the three friends took off. About five minutes later, Jerry came out of his bedroom. "Safe." He said, as I feigned sleep. "Safe, are you awake."

I opened an eye. "Not really."

"Mind if we switch blankets? Lucy's...Lucy's blanket isn't warm enough."

YES I MINDED, but how could I explain it in such a way that I didn't have to admit that I'd come all over their blanket? "Ummmm...I'm naked."

He stood there looking about four Cape Codders over the Sagamore Bridge. "The thing is...." He started. "The thing is....Lucy thinks I might have uh....There might be....It might not be a very clean blanket."

Did they know? Had they smelled the semen in the air? "Huh?"

"Before we left we kind of....and the blanket might be, uh, musty." Had I not mustified the blanket myself, I'd have thrown it off in an intense fit of ewww.

"Well, I've been underneath it for about three hours by now, any mustification has already come in contact with my body. But, like I said, I'm not wearing any pants. If you don't mind going into the other room, I'll get dressed and toss you the blanket."

While Jerry went into his room, I dealt with residual dampness, and tossed the blanket into their room. Jerry told me there was a cleaner blanket in the hall closet. I took it. Then I headed back to the couch, where I tried to block out the sound of Jerry and Lucy having headboard shattering sex under the blanket I'd mustified.

original post: http://community.livejournal.com/bad_sex/988370.html

Melissaphobia (Part 6: InHulkMode)

My first thought was that I could shatter her dog's spine by merely snapping my fingers together. So would end the suffering of Gussy and everyone else who knew her. But I rarely kill ants, there was no way I could kill her dog, even if it meant putting it out of its blissful misery. I debated burning her house down. Gas wasn't as expensive then, but I decided I'd want to wait around and see the flames. That would probably make me a suspect.

In the end, I decided that rather than killing her or having her killed, it would be much more entertaining to see her try and explain herself. I called her and told her I had the money for her (which I did) and that I wanted to meet her the following morning (a Tuesday) to pick up my stuff. She agreed. But on Tuesday morning she was nowhere to be found. On Wednesday she called with some lame ass excuse about a work emergency. She did data entry for a friend of her family's very small business. She spent most of her days playing with her dog in the office. Whatever. I made an appointment to meet her Thursday morning. She said the storage people would be dropping my stuff off at nine. She's meet me at the house then.

I got there at seven. Just in case. At eight she came out to walk Gussy and was surprised to see me there. "Oh, sorry." I said, "I thought you said to meet you at eight." She was definitely shaken, not stirred.

By nine-thirty, there was no storage truck.

"Hold on a second." she said, breaking the tense silence.

I assumed that she was going in to call the storage people or some sort of bodyguard. I was unprepared when she walked out of the house with a box of my books. "It looks like the storage people must have come last night after I went to sleep. Your stuff is in the back hallway."

The storage people had come in the middle of the night? "The storage people came in the middle of the night?" How did they get in? "Do they have keys?"

"I must have left the door unlocked." What-The-Fuck.

If I gave her any more of "the eye" it would have been two eyes. I went into my former home, and sure enough there were piles and garbage bags of my stuff in the back hallway. I was too flummoxed to do a complete inventory, but I did notice one thing missing right away. "Where are my bookshelves?"

"What bookshelves?"

"The bookshelves that held all my books. Two big ones. They were against the wall."

"I don't remember them. Maybe the storage people took them."

"The storage people stole my bookshelves but returned my TV and CD collection?" She shrugged. "Maybe they misplaced them when they were rummaging around in the dark last night when they dropped off my stuff, huh?"

No reply.

I called a friend of mine to pick me up in her truck, so I could put my stuff in real storage.

"Did you remember the receipt from the storage place?"

"Receipt?"

"Yea. You said that storage was costing you a bundle, and I said I'd repay you if you gave me the receipt."

"No. I'm friends with the guy who owns the storage place. He let me have it for free."

"Then why did you tell me it was costing you a bundle?"

"You misunderstood."

Whatever. I then began counting off the thousand dollars. I made to hand them to her. "Oh. One more thing. Do you remember cashing a check for a thousand dollars the day after I left?"

Blank stare.

"Because the bank and the people who wrote the check seem to believe that you've already been paid the rent for the three months that I was away."

"Oh. The check. I forgot about that. It wasn't the amount I was expecting, so I forgot it."

"It was a check for a thousand dollars, right?"

"Yea."

"I did pay you enough money before I left so that the balance of rent while I was gone was only $900, correct?"

"Yea."

"So..."

Blank stare.

"I'm not giving you this money."

"But I need it." She threw her hand in the air, "Why do you make things so difficult?" And walked to her car, where Gussy was shivering in the back seat. "If I don't have the money by tomorrow, I'm calling the police."

"Here's my phone. Call them now. I'd love to hear you explain to them why you forged my signature on a check, and stole my fucken mail, you psycho."

She drove off.

Becca and I moved my stuff into storage uneventfully. The storage facility was right next to work, and i had to work in an hour, so I spent that hour doing inventory.

Things that were missing:

My bookshelves
All of my books from authors K-Z
My bedframe
My DVD/VHS collection
My pornography
My old comic book collection
My two overcoats (one of them my grandfather's cashmere)
My computer (which didn't work, anyway)
A good chunk of my clothes

What was left of my clothes was covered in dried old dog piss. I called and left Melissa a message to call me back. She did not respond. I called about seven times that week. No response. So on the eighth day I left a different kind of message.

"Melissa, it's Insafemode. I've been very patient. If I don't hear from you in forty-eight hours, I'm calling the cops. You stole a great deal from me, and forged my signature on a check. If I don't get a thousand dollars in my hands by the end of the week, I'm having you arrested."

I then went to take a shower. By the time I was finished she had called my phone seven times but left no message.

original posts: http://insafemode.livejournal.com/30121.html, http://insafemode.livejournal.com/30689.html

Melissaphobia (Part 5: Checks And Unbalances)

"I don't live here anymore?" In my head I'm doing the five fingers of death (though Kill Bill 2 has not come out yet, I am intrinsically aware of its future existence).

"You said there'd be a check arriving for me in January. I never received it."

"But I called you in January, and February, and March, and you never mentioned it." I'm pulling out her eyeballs with my fingers, and squishing them beneath my shoes.

"I assumed you knew."

I was just sleep deprived enough to think this whole thing was my fault. I asked her what had happened to all my belongings, and she informed they were in storage. When I could pay her the three months of overdue rent, and the storage fees, she'd return my stuff.

It sounded fair.

I went to Corporate Restaurant and explained my predicament. I needed to work as often as possible in order to get my stuff back. Several of my coworkers offered me couches and spare beds until I found a new place to stay. My current debt to Melissa would be roughly thirteen hundred dollars, I expected to have to have about $1800 to put down on a new place. I was fucked in a way that brought me no pleasure. I was also pissed off.

I called the institution that was supposed to cut me the check. They "thought" they had sent it out to me in January. It would take a couple of days to track down, but they'd be in touch. I posted angry anti-Melissa comments in my other LJ. A certain former landlord's girlfriend (I think, I have no proof of who the anonymous fuckwad was) said of my homelessness and misfortune, "That's awesome. You deserve what you get."

I tried not to turn into InHulkMode.

I called Melissa and asked how much storage was costing her. She said she didn't know, but she'd get back to me. I called her back the next day to ask again, and received no answer. The following day, she called my cell phone asking why I was ignoring her repeated messages. I called my voice mail. I had six messages. None of them from Melissa.

The next week was my birthday. I worked eight hours, and then crashed on a coworker's couch. My mom called to ask me if I'd received my birthday money.

The following morning, I trekked over to Melissa's in search of my mail. In addition to the birthday mail (one from my mom, one from my dad, two sets of grandparents, and one aunt), I was waiting for a package from a friend in Pieceofshitdeserttown.

"You haven't gotten any mail here in months." Ms. Smiley Melissa Face informed me as she was putting her work cooler in her trunk.

"No mail?"

"None."

"You're telling my five people's birthday cards got lost in the mail?"

"I don't know what to tell you." She started to slam down her trunk.

"What's that?" I stopped the trunk with my hand. Inside was a package with my name on it.

"Oh, that. That arrived yesterday. I forgot." It was my package from Pieceofshitdeserttown. "Here."

"No, mail for me, huh?"

While there is no doubt in my mind that she did steal my birthday mail (a federal offense, mind you). I had no proof. She had not been stupid enough to forge my signature on those checks. A few days after the run in by her trunk, though, I got a call from the people who'd written me the $1000 check. They'd written it. They'd mailed it. And on January seventh, the day after I'd left on tour it had been signed over to and cashed by one Melissa F*n Bitchface.

Enter InHulkMode.

Melissaphobia (Part 4: Welcome Home)

It's 1:15 on a Sunday morning. After a two-day bus trip at the culmination of a three-month spoken word tour, I had decided to take a trip to my local venue for a surprise appearance. People were surprised. I was happy. I drank. I was tired. I was writing in short, choppy sentences.

My friend Joycee drove me home from the venue. I pulled my bags out of her trunk, walked up to my door, turned the key in the lock and...nothing. Fuck.

I rang the doorbell, but I had witnessed Melisa sleeping through me banging on her bedroom door when she had blocked our neighbor's driveway with her car. She probably slept through the sex she had with all The Midnight Men. They were probably just a bunch of crazed necrophiliacs (except the Coke guy, I'm sure he had no crazed fetishes).

I realized she had probably changed the locks due to a run in with one of The Midnight Men. Maybe somebody hit her, or maybe she had decided she was going to stick to only one married guy at a time.

When she hadn't answered the door to the apartment, and Gussy hadn't even barked at my knocking and doorbell ringing, I went around to the driveway to check for her car. It was there. While I was in the driveway, I realized that I could probably climb in through my window. I didn't remember whether I'd bothered to lock it. But the odds were that I hadn't. I hopped on to the ledge and ---

There was no furniture in my room. Bed? Gone. Bookcases? Gone. TV? Gone. Desk? Gone. Pile of films and porn? Gone. The closet was open and there were no clothes in it.

I decided that even if the window was unlocked, no good would come from climbing through it. Instead, I walked the couple of miles to Su's house and woke her up, explaining my unpleasant return. She thought I might have just been so tired that I mis-saw.

It was true that I didn't do an exhaustive visual search. There were no streetlights, no lights from inside the house.

At about five-thirty I walked back to the house where I had lived for the past year. Melissa was comingo ut of the house as I walked up to the porch.

"Hey, Insafemode." she beamed. "How was your trip?"

"It was fun. I got to see a part of the country I've never been to, amde enough money to live moderately comfortable, met some nice people. But when I got home the damnedest thing happened. My key wouldn't fit into the lock."

"Oh, yea. You don't live here anymore."

original post: http://insafemode.livejournal.com/28964.html

Melissaphobia (Part 3: Signs and Post-Its)

There were enough signs that Melissa was crazy to keep two engravers, four painters and a troupe of municipal workers in business for the rest of their unnatural lives. First off there was the dog, there were the midnight men, there was the dog, there were the letters addressed to various friends (who I never met) and family members filled with phrases like "you're not being conducive to my needs as a human person" and "I think I'm going to need some space from your negative energy for a while", and, of course, the dog.

I first witnessed one of her nuclear meltdowns in June. I am the sort of person who is pretty well known for being a good listener and problem solver (so long as the problems aren't my own) but when someone tells me they don't want to talk about something, that's the end of the discussion. I'm not going to expend effort to hear about someone's problems, unless there's love, money, or fucking involved. I never did find out what Melissa's meltdown was in response to.

She started leaving me nasty notes. I'm someone who uses a fair amount of notepaper and writing journals but absolutely deplores the Post-It Note industry. Every Post-It Note I've ever seen involves passive aggressive or just downright aggressive language. When I lived in Burlington, my landlord used to leave me love notes such as "Where's the fucking rent?" and "I hate you. Get out of my house." To be fair to him, I was avoiding him because I couldn't afford rent. I understood his frustrations.

Melissa's frustrations were whacky. "I found this pen in the living room. BE MORE CAREFUL!!!!" It was a covered ball-point pen, left in a room that Gussy was forbidden to go into. Another note declared "Gussy did her business in my bedroom while I was gone. In the future PLEASE CLEAN UP when I'm not home." Uhhh...since when is it my business to go into someone else's room and check to see whether or not their spoiled rotten guinea pig impersonator shat on their floor?

In mid-July she announced that she was leaving for Florida for a while. This made me very happy. When she returned home, there were Midnight Men coming at all hours of the day. Fortunately, I was rarely home at all hours of the day. The one great thing about us being roommates was that (after we both quit Crapplebees) she worked days, and I worked nights. We rarely ever saw each other or had to have conversations. Which was good, as I rarely had anything nice to say to her.

original post: http://insafemode.livejournal.com/28834.html

Melissaphobia (Part 2: The Midnight Men)

I don't sleep at night (have you noticed most of my posts are at 4 fricken AM?). My job requires me to be at work promptly at four in the afternoon, sometimes as late as six. I'm done at midnightish, and completely wired when I get home. My life has been like this for the majority of the last three years.

When I first moved in with Melissa, I had yet to buy my bed (best purchase ever), so I was sleeping on the living room couch. I'd invited my friend and coworker Quentin over to play cards. Nothing sleazy, just cards. This was before the madness that is spectator poker. This was merely Cribbage, a game I was once damn good at.

Around 12:15 I heard a key turning in the lock. Melissa was already home. I was already home. There were only two of us. Had Gussy gone outside on her own? If so, why?

A man in his early forties in desperate need of a shave and a shower walked in, blinked curiously at Quentin and I and continued on his way down the hall to Melissa's room. I was puzzled until I heard the sounds of someone trying to quietly fuck. Ahhhh, the boyfriend.

This happened several times through the course of the year that Melissa and I lived together. But it was never the same guy twice. I wondered whether she gave her one spare key out to people she met at bars or whether she always set the key in a plastic Easter egg, and hid the egg in a different location, perhaps putting out ads in magazines or The Internet with directions to where the egg was located. The ad would read: "Want to fuck a moderately attractive girl with dependency issues while being watched and barked at by a miniature dachshund? Go to Pope Hill Park, find the easter egg under the monkey bars in the playground, and follow the directions inside. Bring condoms and rawhide bones."

The only Midnight Man who ever caught my attention was The Coke guy.

I love me some Cherry Coke. One night at around three I went into the kitchen, surprised to find a moderately attractive man in boxers drinking the last of my Cherry Coke.

"This yours?" he asked.

"Yea."

"Sorry, I was really thirsty. I'll replace it tomorrow."

He didn't know what I knew. There was no tomorrow in our house for Midnight Men. Melissa was burying herself under a pile of anonymous men in a pathetic attempt to disguise the fact that nobody loved her enough to commit to her. Maybe we had more in common than I thought.

There was no Cherry Coke in the fridge the next day, but he had blocked up the toilet.

About a week later, I was in the middle of writing when the doorbell rang. There was a Coke truck outside. On the doorstep was Midnight Man with ten cases of Cherry Coke.

"Sorry bout the delay. I'm a little mad at Melissa, but I felt bad about taking the last of your Coke. She tells me you pretty much live off the stuff. Hope you enjoy this. Oh, and don't tell Melissa I said Hi."

I wanted to fuck him right there on the doorstep. Instead I said thank you and began stocking the refrigerator and the pantry.

original post: http://insafemode.livejournal.com/28575.html

Melissaphobia (Part 1: Hell Hound)

A couple of years before I met her, Melissa got dumped hardcore by a boyfriend who must have woken up one morning and gone "Woah, I'm dating a total dependent bitch with no personality of her own, and she's not even that good looking."

She didn't take that well. She apparently spent months crying in bed, leaving only for work and the occasional Ben & Jerry's run (the one aspect of her personality I respected). To get her out of her slump, her grandfather bought her a new puppy: Gussy. Gussy was named after Melissa's dead grandmother. This was my first clue that she was somewhat unbalanced.

The first three months that Gussy was in Melissa's possession, the two did everything together, including sleeping in the same bed. Those of you who know anything about dogs know that sleeping with the dog on a regular basis is a big nono. You must establish that you are the alpha, or you run the risk of having your new companion turn into Frankenpuppy.

Even obedience school couldn't save Gussy from being a horrid little shitstain. Maybe it's because, as a miniature dachsund, she had a Napoleonic complex (sometimes known as a Devito complex). I imagine that it had more to do with Melissa's intimacy issues.

The first day I moved in, Melissa and I were talking in the hallway when Gussy wandered in from the kitchen and took a shit next to Melissa's foot. Melissa's response: "Gussy, I can't believe you're doing this right in front of me." Then, to me: "She usually waits until I'm in the other room before she does her business on the floor."

Ummm...she usually shits on the floor?

"I take her out for walks all the time" (this was true) "but for some reason she likes to do her business in the house." She did. Every night. Every day. Whenever Melissa was home, Gussy was pissing and shitting on the floor. I locked my bedroom door and always watched my feet when I walked around the house.

Melissa was forever stepping in piss puddles (which she referred to as widdle water) and saying "Gussy, bad dog." Then she would give her a treat.

The true victims of the frequent floods of widdle water were the Midnight Men. None of whom ever learned from previous experience to watch their feet when they entered the house. Unless of course none of the Midnight Men were repeat customers. I couldn't tell any of them apart. And when even a gay whore can't keep track of all the random dick that comes into the house to fuck his roommate, you know there's a problem.

original post: http://insafemode.livejournal.com/27816.html

Stuck In A Moment I Can't Get Out Of (Part 5: Abrupt Ending)

My life is abrupt. My relationships start and stop without much hesitation or agonizing. This isn't to say I don't spend great deals of time considering and evaluating things as they happen, it's just that when I reach a decision or someone else makes a decision for me, I go with it. Regrets are dealt with later, if it all. As some have pointed out, my stories are the same way.

Some people seem to think that my stories end abruptly because I get bored with them, or I don't know what to with them. Nope. They end abruptly because that's the way I live my life. A martyr complexed knitter and her friends ask me to pick up my life and move to Pieceofshitdeserttown, I do it, despite my comfortable life and my friends' protests. When, five months later, I am broke and miserably unhappy, I take what I can carry and head home, leaving many of my Earthly possessions behind me. And when Scott accepted my invitation to Nantucket, that was it, we were going. Even though I didn't know him very well, and what I did know I didn't particularly care for.

It was my fault as much as his that the weekend sucked so incredibly much. I couldn't postpone the trip but I could have invited someone else, an old friend, CSB, Tommy, someone I would have enjoyed spending time with regardless of sexual activity. But I'd chosen Scott, and now we were two slightly frustrated gay men who had to spend one more night sharing a bed.

When I learned that he'd taken money out of his account to buy the books, and put some of it aside to take me out for our last lunch before we went home, I disliked him a little less. Plus, he had brought me orange chicken.

We didn't talk much that final night. There was no "coming to terms" with anything, no animosity, just nothing really to say. I woke up, showered, and was pretty much packed before he woke up.

"Morning." He said after a healthy yawnstretch.

"Yes it is."

By the time we made it out of the room, it was noonish. We put our bags down at the front desk, and went downtown to find a nice restaurant. I don't remember what we had, only that it was incredibly good (though not as orgasmic as lobster ravioli). After lunch, we headed back to the hotel, picked up our bags and called a cab. We had about a half hour wait before our plane left. We both read with our headphones on while we waited.

I didn't have any urge to push him out of the plane on our flight back to the mainland. Rather than have my mom pick us up at the airport and risk having to throttle Scott, we took a cab to her parking lot. He offered to drive me to the bus station, but I decided to toss my bags in my mom's condo, and wander around my old neighborhood.

And that was it. Apart from a rather terse Thank You e-mail, I never heard from Scott again. There was something comfortably familiar about that.

original post: http://insafemode.livejournal.com/90960.html

Stuck In A Moment I Can't Get Out Of (Part 4: Contraction)

It doesn't take a degree in physics to know that you shouldn't poor scalding hot coffee into a glass you've just taken out of the freezer. And any server from a corporate restaurant will let you know that you don't take mugs fresh from the heated dishwasher and fill them with ice and cold soda. A quick change in temperature and the glass expands or contracts and creates a fissure and crack, time to get a broom and pick up the pieces.

When I came out of the bathroom and saw nearly naked Scott laying on the bed, I was hot and bothered. I took a while to cool down and fall asleep, and all was right in the world. When I woke up the next morning, and he was prancing around in his see-through kimono, singing and dancing to David Bowie's "Heroes" AND GOING THROUGH MY SUITCASE.

Fissure. Fissure. CARACK!

"Why are you singing that Wallflowers song?" I asked. Once he'd stopped twitching, he explained to me that they had merely covered the song for The Godzilla soundtrack. I knew this already. "Oh, I thought it was a Dylan song."

After a few minutes of awkward silence, he asked "What's on today's agenda?" I do not have agendas. I had intended on spending a romantic sex-filled weekend with someone, anyone really on this tiny little island. As that was no longer going to happen, I was willing to take the events of the day as they came, though I suspected no coming would be involved.

"How about breakfast?" I asked.

Breakfast was phenomenal. Not because of the food. The food was good, but nothing special. Eggs benedict, sausage, and apple juice. It was also not because of the company. The company was mediocre at best. All Scott could talk about was how he used to be fat. There were several times during our breakfast where my fist considered assisting his bulimia. What made breakfast phenomenal was when the bill came.

Scott looked over the bill, did some calculations in his head (a welcome change from the finger counters I'd dated previously), and said "Your total comes to eleven dollars."

"Ok." I said, and I reached into my pocket. My wallet was gone. Oh the shock. The horror. I rechecked each pocket three times. I lifted the cushions of the booth. I checked under the table. The only thing keeping me sane was the knowledge that my wallet was zippered into my secret inner-jacket pocket. "I can't find my wallet. I must have left it back in the room."

"No problem, you can pay me back when we get to the room."

Remarkably, we were unable to find it in my room, even after going through my suitcase, checking under the bed, and going through all the drawers. "Fuck. I can't believe I lost my fucken wallet. I'm going to go down to the front desk and try and retrace my steps. I mean, I had it last night when I paid for our dinner. It can't have gotten too far."

Instead of going to the front desk, I went to the Nantucket Bookworks and proceeded to be frustrated by their lack of anything worth reading. After about fifteen minutes, I gave up and went back to the room.

"Any luck?" Scott asked.

"Only the bad kind."

"What are you going to do?"

Guilt trip you into buying all my meals. "I don't know. I guess I could spend the rest of the trip eating at The Tap House, and charging all my meals to the room, and have my Mom pay for the charges on her credit card."

"Orrrrrr." He said. "We could charge everything to the room, and then not check out."

I'd been trumped.

"No, I couldn't do that. How about you just pay for the meals for the rest of the trip? After all, I've already covered airfare, and hotel. We're only here for another day, anyway."

"I didn't bring that much money."

So don't eat Mr. I Used To Be Fat But Now I'm Thinner And Holier Than Thou.

I pretended to be in deep thought. What I was actually thinking about was this really cool Italian Seafood place I'd walked by. They had Lobster Bisque, and Lobster Ravioli on their menu. Ohhhhhhh lobster. "How much money did you bring?"

"Not much."

What had he planned on doing? Clearly, not me. He knew I wasn't up for being anyone's Sugar Daddy. He didn't seem to like my company very much. I'd invited him because I'd hoped he would be putting out. Why had he accepted? He hadn't even expressed an interest in sight seeing. "Then I guess we might as well leave."

For the first time, something that looked like it might be a genuine emotion other than "You don't appear to know shit about David Bowie" passed over his face. It was just a drive by, but it was a start.

"You want to go home?"

"Well, I don't see much point in staying." I confessed. "We don't have enough money to enjoy the trip or enough chemistry to cause any mildly entertaining reaction."

"You...you don't think we have chemistry?" He appeared to be returning fire in the war of bullshit.

"You've seemed pretty irritated since you picked me up in Barnstable. And then there was that shit with my mother. I mean, if you're going to tell my mother that we're having a romantic weekend here, the least you can do is put out."

"So you want to fuck?" This is the point in the poorly written romantic comedy where the two mismatched characters begin making out passionately, and the camera zooms out, showing that the two are clearly going to be fucking during the passing of time music montage.

"No." Maybe just a little. "That's not the point. I guess I don't understand why you wanted to come here."

"You invited me."

"Yea, but..." Damn it. "Why did you say yes?"

"Because I didn't have any plans this weekend. And the world's ending, and..."

"You didn't know that when I invited you."

"I don't know. I don't know why I came."

"Me neither." I left the room, not slamming the door at all, and walked back to the Italian seafood place. Their bisque was amazing. Their lobster ravioli gave me an erection that didn't go down for weeks.

Scott was not there when I got back to the room. His belongings were.

I was in the midst of determining the proper way to act when he came into the room when he came into the room. "I brought you some Chinese. Do you like Orange Chicken?"

There was hope for him yet. "I love Orange Chicken." However, I've just eaten lobster ravioli and and lobster bisque, so the Orange Chicken will have to wait. "Thanks."

"No problem." He sat down at the little desk in the corner of the room and opened up a bag from the bookstore. Not much money, eh?

original post: http://insafemode.livejournal.com/90074.html

Stuck In A Moment I Can't Get Out Of (Part 3: Out Of Synch)

The worst entries in bad_sex are the entries that merely say "Bad sex is no sex at all. LOL." Being the moderator, it is all I can do to muster the restraint to not ban every idiot who thinks that shit is funny. But I am a master of restraint, no?

But the truth is, not having sex when you're expecting it is one of the worst types of sex. Still, having spent just a few hours with Scott between the bus station in Barnstable, and the restaurant on Nantucket, I resigned myself...hmm...that's not correct...I impeached the possibility of us having sex. He was cute. He was smart. He was also a complete asshole who didn't so much make my skin crawl, as actually stand up and run screaming into the night.

"That was a good dinner." He said when we were back in our room. "Expensive. But good."

"Yea, it's hard to find cheap lobster pot pie these days. I usually wait for June to roll around so I can have one of those delicious McDonald's lobster rolls."

"Ewwww. Are you serious?" He asked.

I gave the universal I'm-too-bored-to-tell-you shoulder shrug.

"I'm gonna go change for bed." We were already in bed, or technically, on bed at this point. While he was in the bathroom I read the unabridged, annotated version of War and Peace a few times, and still had time to complete the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle in permanent marker. When he came out he was wearing...

"Is that a kimono?"

"Yes, they're very comfortable." And see-through. Nice ass. Uh-oh. Red alert. Red alert. We have a breach in the cranial cavity, please direct all blood to the cardiac area. No! The cardiac area. Damn it, who let all that blood trickle down into the secondary brain?

"I'm going to go...brush my teeth." And look menacingly at my cock until it got in synch with my brain. It didn't take long to stare the wilt into it.

I made a very concerted effort not to look at his body as I climbed into bed.

original post: http://insafemode.livejournal.com/89444.html

Stuck In A Moment I Can't Get Out Of (Part 2: Uncomfortable Silences)

Some silences are beautiful. Holding your lover as the sun comes up over the ocean. The middle of the night when you realize that you are laying next to the most important person in the entire world. The seconds after orgasm when words become as useful as copyright warnings on Kazaa. The silence between Scott and I while my mother drove us to the airport was entirely unlike any of those silences. This was the silence of two men walking to the electric chair. One of them was going to be pulling the switch. The other...wasn't.

"Have a good trip." My mother said, knowing full well that we weren't going to.

I presented my tickets at the counter, submitted to the newly created security measures, and handed my bags to someone I hoped was an employee. I handed Scott's bags to someone I hoped wasn't an employee. Unfortunately, both worked for Cape Air.

"The reason we have to take all your bags." The cheerless woman behind the counter explained, "is because weight distribution on planes of this size is very important. We ask that you don't take anything on the plane with you besides yourself, your tickets, and maybe a book or newspaper. We also may ask you to move seats depending on the physical properties of our other passengers."

So if someone "of size" came on to the plane, I wouldn't be able to sit next to the borderline anorexic guy I was taking with me? How would I push him out of the plane if he wasn't within reach?

"The view is beautiful, isn't it?" Scott asked. That's right, keep looking out the window. If I kick you hard enough your skinny ass will go right through the glass and into the ocean. Just think, you'll be sharing your deathbed with a Kennedy.

We both survived the flight. Sadly.

Once on the island, we caught a cab to the hotel. "Do you want me to pay for this?' He asked. Let's see, I was supplying the hotel, the airfare, the dinner. Yes, I think I did want him to pay the ten dollar cab fare. This made him snippy. I had clearly picked the wrong guy to spend the weekend with.

Between when he'd picked me up at the bus station, and when we'd dropped his car off at my mother's, we had spent a half hour at his house listening to David Bowie and talking about how he used to be fat. The conversation bored me. I didn't care if he used to be fat. I would have cared if he used to be interesting, but that wasn't the case. He hadn't purged away the interesting part of his personality. He'd never had one. Hence we'd grown up in the same town, been only a year apart in school, yet I had never registered his existence.

"This hotel is great."

"Yea. The canopy bed is a nice touch."

"Do you want to watch TV?"

"Sure" Anything not to have to make small talk with you, Scott.

Every station in the country was still on 24 hour apocalypse watch. Even MTV was just playing Live's "Overcome" and U2's "Stuck in a Moment" over and over and over and over and over again.

"Oh, look, there's a minifridge in here. I'm going to go to the grocery store and buy a few things. Want to come?" I asked.

"I hope you don't think I'm going to put out this weekend."

The part of my brain that tried to connect my question with his answer, popped out of my ear and ran screaming for the ocean, where it gave itself a proper Viking Funeral. "I'll take that as a no then."

"I'm just saying you don't need to buy condoms."

"I liked you better when you were fat," I said, "and I didn't know who you were."

When I came back from the grocery store, Scott was in his boxers in the bathroom, admiring his body in the bathroom mirror. "You know I was kidding before about the whole not putting out, and the condom thing, right?"

Sure, Mister Mind Game. I've spent a month living with a spoiled narcissistic schizophrenic compulsive liar with a cute accent but no ass, your kung fu is weak. "Oh yea. Obviously. I would never seriously insult you for your old body size. I'm not an asshole." Luckily, he was in the other room, and I didn't have to make eye contact.

"So what do you want to do today?"

"I just want to walk around the island and check out the beaches, and the touristy little places." And if you're going to continue to be an asshole, I want you to cover your dick in snails and stick it in a lobster trap.

Our walk was mostly tolerable. It was Indian Summer (or Native American Warm Season When Most Schools Are Out, if you're going to be all P.C.), and the beaches were barren, but beautiful. We talked about our respective arts. Me, being a writer, he, a photographer. He was not very knowledgeable. I had studied photography in junior high, and I appeared to know more about it than he did.

When the sun went down, and the shops closed up for the night, we decided to stop at the restaurant attached to the hotel, The Tap Room. I ordered a Caesar salad, and a Coke. He had a Lobster Pot Pie, and a couple of beers.

"Hey, do you mind grabbing the bill for this meal?" He asked. "I didn't bring my money with me."

"How about I wait here, while you go up to the room and get your money? It'll only take about two minutes."

And we dived head first back into uncomfortable silence.

original post: http://insafemode.livejournal.com/87683.html

Stuck In A Moment I Can't Get Out Of (Part 1: Scotthole)

My father moved to Martha's Vineyard while I was away at school. It wasn't remotely traumatic. It wasn't even a remote island (I'm cockslapping myself for that joke, don't you worry). I started spending on average about three weeks of the year on the island. I felt like a Clinton.

But despite all my vast Martha's Vineyard experience, I'd never been to Nantucket. Sure, I'd drunk the Nectars, I'd recited the dirty limericks, but I'd never actually been there. I was overjoyed when, in April of 2001 I won a two nights stay at The Jared Coffin House, complete with round trip airfare for two from the Cape.

In July, I was hanging out with some jailbait who was crushing on me, and who I was...desperately trying not to crush back on (I barely made it...he was sooo cute/funny/smart/completely illegal), and he asked if he could come with me to the island. No. No. No. Hmmmmm...No. But it did remind me that I had to book the trip at some point. I was going to Seattle in August for the National Poetry Slam finals, and I was broker than an old pop culture reference, BUT I didn't want to go to Nantucket during the winter when it was all cold and desolate. So I called and made a reservation for September 14th. 2001.

September 11th, I was scheduled to do a poetry show in Portland Maine, with the only really Deaf Poet on Def Jam, Ayisha Knight. I was voicing all her poems, and she was signing all mine. We'd also interwoven our poetry into one long show. It would have kicked so much ass, but, you know the planes and the buildings and the dying happened, and it didn't look like the show was going to happen. We were also opening for Folk Implosion that night. Damnit.

After an awkward day of honing my ASL skills on the subject of terrorism, we drove back to Boston, where i was staying with Zuzu the Political Activist. That was fun. Really. I'm being completely sincere. No, I mean it.

After a few hours of nonsensical ranting, I checked my e-mail.

Hey Safey,
Looks like the world is kind of fucked up right now. Are we still on for this weekend on Nantucket? I completely understand if you're not in the mood, but maybe some time away from the real world will do us some good. Hope you're slamming your heart out.

Scott.

Oh, right. Nantucket. Scott.

Scott was the one person who ever replied to my PlanetOut ad (looooooooooooong since removed). He was 23 (I was 24 at the time), a former fatty who was now borderline anorexic, and interesting. Not necessarily in a good way. We'd gone to a PJ Harvey concert together a week before, and had...hmmm...we had something that was almost fun. The concert was good. I discovered he lived on the Cape at the same time I had, yet we had never met. However, we knew about a billion people in common, so we talked about them.

After out pseudo-date we sort of hugged, but not really, and he drove back to the Cape, while I was explaining to Zuzu why, despite our awkward first "date", I had invited him to Nantucket: "No other prospects."

Scott picked me up at the bus station (sexy, sexy), and drove to my mother's. The plan was to park his car at her house, take the cab to the airport, and be on our way. But nooooooooooooooooo, Scott wanted to meet my mother, and have her drive us to the airport. I love my mother, but she's CRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAZY, and more than a bit bitchy to my friends. Jennifer had suggested running her over with my car, my boss at Kookaburra Canyon would hide in the kitchen when my mother came to visit me at work, and Liam was more direct when he asked me "Dude, why is your mom such an insufferable bitch to me?" She had plotted to have Elvis killed before I figured out that that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. Why would I want to introduce her to someone I didn't particularly like, but wanted to have sex with in the near future?

I prepped him. My mom knew I was gay (she had nearly walked in on me and Elvis on more than the occasion), but we didn't talk about it. Talking about it involved crying. This is the woman who just two weeks ago, chastised me for voting in VT instead of MA (that's where my ID is from). "Just think, if you'd voted here instead of Vermont, you could have changed things."

"What do you mean?" I asked her.

"You did vote for Bush, right?" No, she wasn't kidding.

My prep for Scott included just telling her we were friends from College (he was currently attending the community college I had gone to a year and a half before), and that we were going to get away from the 9/11 stuff.

"Actually," he confessed when we were in her house, "I met him on an online personals site. We're going for a romantic weekend." I was so going to kill him.

original post: http://insafemode.livejournal.com/87001.html